Gnash Project

The second alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version 0.7.2. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.

Improvements since the 0.7.1 alpha release are:

* Polling main loop replaced with event driven framework for GTK.
* New GUI abstraction layer supporting GTK2, KDE, SDL, and a bare framebuffer.
* Movies are parsed by a background thread, so they start playing while still loading.
* Plugin supports web navigation and starts playing while the stream is loading.
* New AntiGrain (AGG) 2D backend added for framebuffer devices without OpenGL support.
* New Framebuffer GUI for devices without X11.
* Sound now works using ffmpeg, Gstreamer, or libMad.
* Supports cross configuration and cross compiling for embedded targets.
* A whole slew of minor bugs that kept various movies from playing.

TODO

* Video is starting to work in CVS, but not in the 0.7.2 release. It currently uses ffmpeg to support a wide variety of video codecs. So you still can't use Gnash to go to Lulu.tv or Youtube or Google.
* Flash 8 movies are barely supported. The recent release of Tamarin should speed up getting Gnash to v9 levels.
* The drawing API for MovieClips is unsupported.

Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript classes for SWF version 8.5. All the core ones are implemented, and many of the newer ones work, but may be missing some of their methods. If the browser only displays a blank
window, it is likely because of an unimplemented feature. All unimplemented opcodes and ActionScript classes and methods print a warning when using -v with gnash or gprocessor. Using gprocessor -v is a quick way to see why a movie isn't playing correctly.

You can grab the Gnash sources from ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/,
or from Gnash CVS with the tag "release_0_7_2". Binary packages for Debian or RPM based systems will be available from your GNU/Linux distribution, and from whatever BSD variant you are using. Please report packaging bugs upstream to your distribution. If you think you have found a bug in Gnash, then you should file as complete a report as possible at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash. Patches are
always prefered to bug reports, as this is a community project. You can submit patches at https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=gnash, or
email them to gnash-dev@gnu.org. As heavy bug fixing and development is going on, please make sure your bug still exists in cvs HEAD before reporting.

Please include the operating system name and version, compiler version, and which gnash version you are using, in your bug reports. For bugs in the plugin, please also add the browser and it's version. Gnash does not support Firefox versions below 1.0.4.

Questions about Gnash or offers of help can go to the developers email list at gnash-dev@gnu.org.

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5a92c430ee5a3c645a2a9138ae90f29e gnash-0.7.2.tar.bz2.sig